Obama’s philosophical challenge to the GOP

What happened

President Obama this week used his State of the Union address to claim the political center, while challenging Republicans to a philosophical debate over how best to revive America’s competitiveness in a global economy. In a speech filled with optimistic rhetoric and praise for American initiative, Obama proposed new federal “investment” in education, renewable energy, and biomedical and technology research to create new jobs, while calling for a five-year spending freeze on some federal programs. He spoke repeatedly of the need for bipartisanship, entreating Republicans to work with congressional Democrats and the White House on the economy, budget deficits, and health care. “We will move forward together, or not at all,” he said. Obama pledged vague support for GOP priorities such as cuts to corporate tax rates and medical-malpractice reform, but reiterated a vision largely consistent with his administration’s first two years.

In the GOP response, Rep. Paul Ryan warned that the U.S. economy was on the verge of collapse because of mounting deficits, and said that the key to reviving America is to reduce the size of government and debt, now accumulating at the pace of more than $1 trillion a year. “What was a fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis,” Ryan said. Like Obama, Ryan was short on specifics, and did not say which programs should be cut or by how much.

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What the editorials said

“Obama’s economic strategy is a high-speed train to nowhere,” said National Review Online. Even while acknowledging that government is incapable of picking the industries of the future, he remains wedded to the “faddish boondoggle of high-speed rail” and the phantom jobs of renewable energy. Obama “hasn’t changed his stripes,” said the New York Post. In his speech, “he studiously avoided controversy,” vaguely saying he’d freeze spending by merging federal agencies, and failing to give a price tag for his new spending initiatives.

Actually, the president “struck a fair balance,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Spurring job growth is still the federal government’s most urgent priority,” which is why Obama proposed making investments to stimulate the economy, while eliminating redundancy in some federal programs. With nearly 15 million people jobless, sharp spending cuts now would threaten a fragile recovery, as well as “our most vulnerable citizens.”

What the columnists said

As “a positioning device for the next two years, Obama’s speech was a masterpiece,” said Ed Kilgore in The New Republic online. By refusing to detail his own spending cuts, Obama is forcing Republican deficit trimmers to choose between two awful options. Either they initiate plans to cut Social Security and Medicare—“which is very perilous to a party whose base has become older voters”—or propose massive cuts in other popular programs. Obama took no chances, but “set a cunning political trap for his enemies.”

In so doing, he takes the voters for suckers, said Yuval Levin in National Review Online. Obama based this speech on the dubious presumption “that everything is fine again,” enabling him to return to his Kumbaya rhetoric from the 2008 campaign and meaningless “chatter about solar panels” straight from Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union. But this isn’t 1996, with the economy booming. Obama’s challenge as president is “to avoid a truly disastrous entitlement and debt crisis,” and this speech was nothing but “a dereliction of duty.” When it came to cutting spending, said Michael Gerson in WashingtonPost.com, the president essentially told Republicans, “‘You go first.’” Despite all his talk of bipartisan solutions, his belief in the need for government solutions “revealed a stark ideological divide.”

And where does that leave the country? said Ross Douthat in NYTimes.com. In his 7,000-word speech, Obama barely addressed the “looming insolvency of our entitlement system,” which is the main fiscal challenge facing the nation. In Paul Ryan’s “first big moment on the national stage, the words ‘Medicare’ and ‘Social Security’ did not pass” his lips. Neither party, clearly, wants to make “big moves” 12 months before a presidential campaign. Both are betting there’s still time to address the debt “before the real crunch arrives. Let’s hope they’re right.”